Brickbat: To Serve and Protect

The Los Angeles County Sheriff Department says it has disciplined some of the deputies who failed to properly investigate multiple abuse complaints against the mother of Gabriel Fernandez and her boyfriend. The two are charged with killing the 8-year-old. But court records indicate the pair beat, burned and otherwise tortured the boy for months before his death. His teacher filed multiple reports on the injuries he came to school with. But social workers and sheriff's deputies made only minimal investigations of the family. Four social workers have been charged with felony child abuse, but the sheriff's department refuses to say what discipline the deputies received.

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Yeah, I don’t get it. These fucking bureaucrats seem ready to take anyone’s kid away at the drop of a hat, but when an actual shitbag parent is flagrantly abusing his or her child they can’t be bothered…. WTF?!?

My current theory is that they flip a coin. Heads, they nail somebody to the wall, tails, they figure it’s all good. Once they’ve made the coin flip, they don’t let anything as minor as evidence, the law or common sense change their course.

Social workers, even though they’re government workers, are mundanes still and therefore held to a higher standard, more is expected of them than from the cops. The cops no doubt got a letter placed in their personnel files with a big frowny face on it.

One deputy went to the boy’s Palmdale home after his teacher said he had been beaten with a belt. Another deputy, responding to a report that Gabriel was suicidal, left the home without examining or interviewing him.

When a security guard called to report that Gabriel had bruises on his face and what looked like cigarette burns all over his scalp, he was rebuffed by a sheriff’s deputy who screamed that a child being burned was not an emergency, according to court records. Another deputy who eventually went to check on the boy decided that the injuries were caused by a fall from a bicycle.

The department’s final investigation came a week before Gabriel’s death. A sheriff’s deputy tried to find him after school officials reported that he had been absent for a long period and might be a victim of abuse. Gabriel’s mother said that her son had moved to Texas, and the deputy soon halted the inquiry. In fact, Gabriel was still in Palmdale, being beaten with a bat, shot with a BB gun, starved, locked in a small box and forced to eat cat feces, according to prosecutors.

The only explanation is that the punishment meted out to these deputies was so dark, horrendous, and barbaric, that the department doesn’t want it’s citizens to have nightmares over the brutality of the justice that was served. It’s the “protect” part of “to serve and protect” when you think about it.

The disturbing thing here is the thumb on the scale: social workers being charged w a crime for not intervening, when you know they (let alone the police) wouldn’t be charge w a crime had they intervened detrimentally in a case that didn’t need their intervention.

Huh? Charge them with failing to do their jobs, which would mean getting fired. But charging them with child abuse themselves? Are they being charged with crimes that were actually committed by those they were sent to investigate? If that is what is happening, if that is what the law provides for, then it is no wonder there is so much overreach on the part of DCS, and we wind up with cases like children walking in the snow being called abuse. The law that provides for these charges needs to be changed.